


Monsters Of Men

by Telas_Selar



Category: Fear in the Night (1947)
Genre: Anxiety, Choking, Gaps in memory, Hyperventilation, Murder, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 17:25:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20568101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telas_Selar/pseuds/Telas_Selar
Summary: Vince Grayson is a minimum wage bank teller with no health problems, no troubles, and certainly no history of criminal charges.That all changes when he awakens from a dark nightmare that's just all too real.Slightly divergent retelling of the second scene in the film.





	Monsters Of Men

I could feel it when I woke, the sickening throb of my pulse in my throat as I wrestled with the bedsheets. 

They were a mess, an incoherent jumble of crisp cold linen that had somehow become warm as lead and entangled with my legs, very nearly tripping me up as I struggled to get the hell out of that bed. 

I couldn't breathe, at least not the way I should have been able to, and sweat had soaked through the back of my shirt. 

As I stumbled into the bathroom, legs trembling with the effort of the simple action, the sickness I felt upon the moment I'd opened my eyes washed over me more intensely than I expected, and I doubled over, shaking fingertips gripping the edge of the sink, my thoughts shrieking one sentence over and over loud enough to make my head pound. 

I killed a man. I killed a man.  _ I killed a man.  _

I, Vince Grayson, minimum wage bank teller, soft-spoken young man without a care in the world, had somehow shoved another man against the wall and murdered him in cold blood. I had taken up a humble instrument and rammed it into his ribs. 

_ I _ 'd done that. 

A dream would not normally have riled me up this way, no matter how bizarre, or so I thought, but the discovery of the dark, mottled bruises upon my throat did not aid my feeble attempts to calm down in the slightest. 

No, they only increased the sheer horror I felt as I pressed my ice-cold fingertips to them, further confirming the truth of the matter. 

I could not have done this...my hands were much smaller than the hands of my victim, as he fought against me in that dark room, trying and failing to contain whatever rage I must have shown towards him. 

My breath was coming in short, sharp gasps now, as I stepped away from the sink, not wanting to gaze upon this reflection a second longer. 

It was then that I noticed the dried blood upon my wrist. Blood that could not possibly be mine, for there was no pain, no cut. Nothing. 

Seized by a whim, I put a hand into my pockets, first the left, and then the right. 

The second yielded to me a key and two black buttons. 

The key to the closet I had dragged the body into. The buttons torn from his coat upon my manhandling of him. 

"No…" I whispered in a voice barely audible to the empty room as I stumbled even further backwards, vision blurring. I was hyperventilating, bordering on the very verge of hysterics. "This can't be…good lord, please no. Show me mercy!"

The Lord, however good, did not respond to me, as I somehow managed to divert my course back towards my unmade bed and collapse onto it, my eyes bone dry despite the fact that I had not blinked for what I presumed to be a while. 

I was a murderer. I was a cold-blooded killer and the worst of it was that I could not understand why I had done it. 

There was no logic to this, no motive. There was nothing…not a single damn thing that could make sense to me in this. 

I could barely speak as I rung my manager, lied about my inability to come in for work. Told him the first thing I could come up with - I was ill.. And I could not show. 

He sounded concerned, at least partly, but this only furthered my guilt as I set down the receiver and put my head in my hands, shaking uncontrollably, dry sobs racking my body.

"Oh lord.." I choked out again. 

  
  



End file.
